Intelligent Video for Protecting Crowded Sports Venues

Intelligent video in urban settings can be challenging due the presence of crowds, clutter, poor camera placement and continuously changing light conditions. The surveillance of sports venues is particularly difficult, because thousands of people can enter or exit a venue in short periods of time. This paper presents a case study of successfully monitoring a sports venue using a multi-camera multi-target tracking system. The system performed site-wide tracking throughout a network of calibrated cameras and was able to accurately track thousands of people in real-time under challenging conditions. The extracted tracking information was used to detect a range of real-time events such as crowd formation, left luggage, and loitering. In addition all video,track and event information was indexed and stored to allow operators to perform playback and forensic search. This paper will present an overview of the deployed system and discuss the challenges that were encountered during the deployment.